Three Ways To Engage Employees as Sustainability Brand Advocates

So you want to harness the power of your employees to tell your sustainability story? Recently I was on a panel at the 12th Annual Sustainability Reporting and Communications Summit Europe 2018, and here are my key takeaways.

First off, you need happy and engaged staff before you can think about asking them to be brand ambassadors. Consider how Maslow’s Hierarchy relates to employee engagement psychology. Frankly if you are not a great employer, no employee is going to want to rave about your sustainability efforts. Here is your checklist

• Survival & Safety–This includes the need to have a job, a salary that pays the bills, and a sense of financial independence.
• Belonging – People need to feel like they’re part of a team, that they are a part of something bigger. Teamwork and inclusion are key
• Importance –individuals need to feel like they’re important to a team and the overall organization. When your employees perform well, let them know it.

If you are confident on the points above, we can move on.

1.        Engage employees in your program

At CA Technologies when we launched our social responsibility program called Create Tomorrow in 2015, we put our employees at the heart of the strategy. The program is designed to inspire and excite young people, especially girls, about a career in STEM and particularly tech. We felt our employees were ideally positioned to help with this challenge – showcasing all their experience and insights could be very powerful. Every employee is given five days of volunteering per year.

Firstly, we had to engage them around the goals, strategy and the roles they could play with our new mission. A part of this required us pulling back from a number of disparate activities which did not align with our new program or the SDGs. It was not easy as many staff were emotionally engaged with several local projects so it was a journey to be handled sensitively

Also, not everyone feels comfortable standing up in front of a room full of teenagers, so we had to develop ways everyone could be involved in Create Tomorrow. Whether it was directly hosting events and programs with young people or delivering virtual webinars to teachers about the future of work, or for our team in Barcelona who helped by translating materials for the program.

2.        Excite Them

We started small with various programs in the UK, Italy and France, quickly expanding to the Czech republic, Spain and Germany amongst other countries. Working in a very agile way, we continually evaluated the experience by employees, students and teachers so we could learn and share this with the volunteers. A strong sense of pride began to emerge and new people began signing up to take part as they got excited about how they could make a difference.

So we introduced a way of recognizing those who’d taken part. We had a Lego mini figure created of them which was presented by their local management team in their quarterly town halls. We were calling out the volunteers and recognizing them first of all internally and then secondly externally, by proactively promoting the program and our STEM Ambassadors.

3.        Empower Them

Employees were also keen to talk about what they were doing externally – we leveraged tools like GaggleAMP with pre populated content, photos etc., and working with our HR & Recruitment team, promoted the volunteers via our Bring What you Bring campaign – designed to showcase what a great place CA is to work.

Since we launched, our employees have helped us reach more than 38,000 young people and we are on track to reach 50k, by 2020.

The latest milestone is to engage our customers directly, inviting them to take part and volunteer with us – just another way to showcase how we are committed

And, finally back to Maslow’s Hierarchy: when employees feel important and recognized, they feel like they can take on more of a leadership role within their company. Giving them opportunities such as being involved in social responsibility and sustainability programmes provides growth, learning, leadership and advancement.

When they reach this point, they inspire others along the way and create a ripple effect of employee engagement. This kind of employee is incredibly beneficial to the health of employee engagement because their enthusiasm and attitude actually inspire others to want to perform on their level. This energy is contagious and is exactly what makes a great brand advocate.